The present invention relates generally to system migration, and more particularly to system migration via live partition mobility using ordered memory migration.
A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components crucial to a company's vitality. Information technology (IT) operations within a data center are a crucial aspect of many organizational operations within an industry. A company may operate its own data center, or optionally the company may receive its IT services as a cloud computing service. Companies rely on their IT operations to run their day-to-day business activities, with a primary concern being maintaining business continuity. If a computer system or application becomes unavailable, company operations may be impaired or stopped completely. It is necessary to provide reliable infrastructure for IT operations, in order to minimize any chance of service disruption. A data center must therefore keep high standards for assuring the integrity and functionality of its hosted computer environment.
The capacity of physical servers located in a data center is increasing, resulting in the number of virtual machines, also known as logical partitions or LPARs, defined on a physical server to also increase. An LPAR is the division of a computer's processors, memory, and storage into multiple sets of resources so that each set of resources can be operated independently with its own operating system instance and applications. Situations may arise (e.g., server maintenance) that require a physical server to be shut down, meaning that all LPARs on the physical server will have to be shut down as well. To avoid disruption, live partition mobility (LPM) may be used to migrate a running LPAR from one managed system to another. LPM allows for the movement (i.e., migration) of an active (i.e., running) LPAR from one system to another with no application downtime.